1/ tonight I was going through my notes from reading "Hate in the Homeland" by @milleridriss (I strongly reccomend the book) and I have some thoughts I want to share about what she discusses regarding sacred spaces/geography.
2/ she discusses how geography & scared spaces play an important role with far-right extremists and how they use geography to justify their anti-immigrant stances, concepts like blood and soil, or comparing the white race to natives for their loss of land as was done by AfD.
3/ For QAnon, their inhabit a space where they are fighting an information war against the deep state. As it is an information war they are fighting, would their sacred spaces be the social media platforms they consider to be the battle grounds?
4/ Twitter is where We and QAnon influencers repeatedly stated where the information war was to be fought, and since the mass deplstforming following Jan 6, QAnon have constantly bemoaned their loss of Twitter access (more so than YouTube, Facebook or Instagram)
5/ Though there are important geographical spaces outside of the digital ecosystems they inhabit, I do not believe they have a sacred space that would be outside of these ecosystems as there is no clear relation to spaces offline that is coherent in QAnon.
6/ the reason I have been thinking about this is that sacred spaces play an important role when considering policies against an extremist movement as it can impact prevention efforts and also further radicalized individuals.
7/ Thus, if we remove extremists from their sacred space there is an implication for radicalization and accelerating that process. Therefore, for QAnon deplatforming has a different impact than those who don't have a sense of attachement to specific digital ecosystems. 8
8/ So when it comes to recommending prevention or identification of dangerous actors from groups like QAnon that perceive (a) digital ecosystem as sacred space, this should play a role and be considered in threat assesments and policy recommendations.
9/ this also speaks to the need to consider attempts at creating friction with those falling down the extremist rabbithole earlier on in the process prior to forming sacred attachement to digital ecosystems.
10/ still need to think about how this can fit in threat assesments and how this could fit in prevention strategies regarding extremists groups that consider digital ecosystems as sacred spaces.
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